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Keynote:
Keynote:
The Planning Fallacy and the Agent's Perspective
Julia Staffel, CU Boulder
The Planning Fallacy and the Agent's Perspective
Julia Staffel, CU Boulder
People often resolve to do difficult things, despite having evidence that they might fail. This presents a puzzle: How can these resolutions be rational and sincere, given the evidence of likely failure? Adding to the puzzle, studies have shown that people are overly optimistic about their own success while offering realistic assessments of other people’s prospects.
Research on the planning fallacy, maintaining evidentialist commitments, argues that people’s overconfidence in their own success prospects is irrational. By contrast, some philosophers claim that agents must divorce practical from evidential reasoning, allowing them to rationally and sincerely intend difficult actions despite the evidence.
I argue for an empirically informed, evidentialist account of how agents can rationally and sincerely resolve to do difficult actions. By forming the right kinds of implementation intentions, agents can raise their probability of success in many cases. Further, the view explains how the observed self-other asymmetry can be rational.
Graduate Speakers
On Inquiring Lovingly: A Murdochian Account
Lepei Liu, University of Minnesota
On Inquiring Lovingly: A Murdochian Account
Lepei Liu, University of Minnesota
Comments: Jonah Wolf Ragir, UCLA
This paper aims to articulate and justify an ethic of inquiry by examining the ideal form of one’s inquiry into another person, particularly their beloved. I start by examining the recent contributions of respectful inquiry, arguing that such accounts are insufficient for loving relationships as they cannot fully capture the positive expectations the beloved legitimately holds regarding the lover: (1) an enduring disposition to inquiring into the beloved; (2) the recognition of the beloved’s perspective as indispensable to the inquiry of them; (3) the pursuit of a fuller and deeper understanding rather than mere propositional knowledge of the beloved. Based on Iris Murdoch’s account of love—interpreted as the disposition to attend to the unique reality of the beloved in an unselfing way when the reality of the beloved grabs our attention—I argue that a Murdochian view of love can account for these positive zetetic expectations.
The Epistemic Rationality of Grit
Jingzhi Chen, McGill
The Epistemic Rationality of Grit
Jingzhi Chen, McGill
Comments: Yasha Sapir, USC
The problem of the epistemic rationality of grit asks how an agent can be both rationally gritty and epistemically rational. In this paper, I examine Morton and Paul’s evidential threshold account and argue that it fails to capture a distinctive feature of a gritty agent’s evidential situation. On their view, the agent’s evidence is inconclusive insofar as it supports only probabilistic judgments rather than certainty about success. I argue that a gritty agent’s evidence is inconclusive in a deeper sense: the evidence available to her is insufficient to rationally form any belief about her own likelihood of success. Drawing on this distinction, I argue that the evidential threshold account is inadequate. I then propose an alternative explanation of the epistemic rationality of grit, which not only does justice to the gritty agent’s evidential position but also shows that grit is not merely of practical importance, but also carries genuine epistemic significance.
What my future beliefs should be about
Konstantinos Konstantinou, Stanford
What my future beliefs should be about
Konstantinos Konstantinou, Stanford
Comments: Xi Xiong, USC
That beliefs are sensitive to subject matters has been a convergence point of recent work in the philosophy of language and epistemology. Nonetheless, existing accounts construe the subject matter of one’s beliefs only as fixed at a time. This paper introduces a diachronic perspective by asking: what should one believe about how the subject matter of one’s current belief that p will evolve? The answer, I argue, is not a single rational expectation, applicable to all beliefs and subject matters. Instead, there are three alternative attitudes one can assume toward the future subject matter of one’s beliefs, each of which is legitimate in different environments. In Section 2, I motivate the intuitive view that if one keeps believing that p, one should expect one’s belief’s subject matter to remain the same. In Section 3, I bring in counterexamples suggesting that sometimes one should expect the subject matter of one’s belief that p to change by becoming more fine-grained in the future. In Section 4, I introduce a contrasting class of cases in which one should instead expect the subject matter to become less fine-grained. Section 5 addresses the worry that the aforementioned attitudes concern simply belief-change, not change of subject matter. I conclude with two suggestions for further work: first, that the three attitudes above also reflect interlocutors’ stances toward the subject matter(s) of their conversations; second, that in contexts pertaining to aesthetic value, no expectation whatsoever is to be had when it comes to the future subject matter(s) of my current belief that p.
Innocent Apologies
Ilya Shemmer, NYU
Innocent Apologies
Ilya Shemmer, NYU
Comments: Robert Campbell, UCLA
There is a consensus among ethicists that a proper apology requires an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. I maintain, against this, that innocent apologies—apologies which deny wrongdoing—are a fully genuine and legitimate form of apology. I argue that the rejection of innocent apologies rests on a failure to recognise an important complexity of life with others: the possibility of moral compromise. I characterise moral compromise and distinguish it from other responses to disagreement. An innocent apology, I suggest, can be understood as a conciliatory gesture towards a compromise. Once standard accounts of apology are adapted to take into account the possibility of moral compromise, we will see that innocent apologies, thus understood, can fulfill all the basic functions an apology might be supposed to fulfill.
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